RE: Flame Linus to a crisp!

[Downing, Thomas]

From: John Bradford [mailto:[e-mail]]

>> > I'd like to see an x86 completely in perf board. I thought my high
>> > school digital electronics type stuff looked bad...
>> 
>> You could do it nowadays using dynamic binary translation, and an
>> absurdly simple CPU capable of accessing a large memory.  You'd need a
>> DIMM for the large memory, but get away with discrete logic for the
>> CPU if you really wanted to.
>> 
>> At perf board sizes using discrete logic, expect it run run quite slow :)
>
> Could we not take this idea to it's logical extreme, and simply
> calculate the results of every opcode, on every value, for every state
> of all of the registers, and store them in an array of DIMMs, and
> simply look up the necessary results?  I.E. a cpu which is one _huge_
> look up table :-).
>
> John.

NOW your'e talking! Alan Turing meets Julian Barbour.